Measuring the Strength of a Person's Gaze
Science Quickly
Scientific American
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2018
⏱️ 3 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Deadpool here. We're very excited to be joining you, but we should set the table correctly. |
| 0:05.4 | We're mostly going to make enemies with Disney and make a lot of jokes at Hughes' expense. |
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| 0:10.4 | So sit back, relax, while we travel to a place where grown men and women walk around in tights and act like it's not a giant cultural cry for help. |
| 0:19.0 | Because this is cinema. Shaggy! Oh my God! This is Cinema Cinema. |
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| 0:25.0 | Marvel Studios Deadpool in Wolverine in Cinemas Thursday, July 25th. |
| 0:30.0 | This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins. |
| 0:36.3 | You're at a party and you suddenly feel someone looking at you. |
| 0:40.1 | But how can it be possible to feel another person's gaze? I mean, it's not like people shoot |
| 0:46.4 | actual beams out of their eyes. Yet, a new study suggests that unconsciously, we actually do believe that looking exerts a slight force on the things being looked at. |
| 0:58.0 | That eye-opening finding appears in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |
| 1:02.0 | Vision depends on light entering the eye. the often express a belief in extra mission, the idea that the eyes emit a form of invisible energy. |
| 1:16.0 | To probe this perception, researchers at Princeton asked volunteers to look at a computer screen, |
| 1:21.0 | and gauge the angle at which a cardboard tube, shown being |
| 1:25.2 | slowly tilted on its side, would finally topple over. Now, in some of the tests, they |
| 1:30.6 | included an image of a young man watching the tube as it tilted toward him. |
| 1:35.7 | What the researchers found is that when there was someone staring at the tube, subjects thought |
| 1:40.1 | that the tube could tilt a little further before it toppled the fellow looking at it. |
| 1:45.2 | Which means that unconsciously, the volunteers must have imagined that the guy's gaze exerted |
| 1:50.9 | a slight force on the tube keeping it from falling. |
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